Contemporary Secwépemc Art

Tania Willard is an "Indigenous Canadian multidisciplinary artist, graphic designer, and curator, known for mixing traditional Indigenous arts practices with contemporary ideas." She is from the Secwepemc nation of British Columbia's interior.

Her practice spans "oil and acrylic painting, printmaking, pen and ink drawing, watercolour, mixed media, and collage." In her own words: "Land-based art, community engaged practice, printmaking, painting are the mediums I most often work in."

BUSH Gallery, an experimental residency on her Secwepemc land, is described as "a series of on-going gatherings of like-minded folks united under questions concerning art making, land, Indigenous art history." It relocates the questions of the art world onto the land itself.

As a curator Willard co-curated Beat Nation: Art, Hip Hop and Aboriginal Culture, a touring exhibition shown across major Canadian cities, and co-organized #callresponse, a project centring Indigenous women artists. She received a Hnatyshyn Foundation Award for Curatorial Excellence in Contemporary Art, and in 2026 was appointed Director of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at the University of British Columbia.

Willard is the Secwepemc artist most fully documented in openly licensed sources; many other practising Secwepemc carvers, basket makers and painters are known through community catalogues and regional press rather than encyclopedic sources, a gap this gallery should close in partnership with the community.